Why skipping meals, fasting or restricting is a really bad idea:

date: 2013-04-03 time: 14:58:00

It only takes 4 - 6 hours for your body to enter into starvation mode. In this mode your metabolism slows down making you less efficient at burning calories. Your body will protect the fat on your body in order to keep you warm and will instead start burning up your muscles for energy - including your heart.

Your brain uses glucose it gets from food to work properly. You get fuzzy headed after not eating for a few hours because your brain can’t store the glucose and the glucose from your latest meal has been used up. You may notice you start gettingshaky, tired, very hungry, unable to concentrate, a pounding heart, nausea, headaches and a whole host of other unpleasant symptoms. All of which are resolved by eating something.

Your heart and kidney tissues alone need 200 calories a day for each pound they weigh (your heart weighs approximately half a pound, one kidney weighs around 0.37 pounds). Your brain requires around 109 calories per pound a day to function and your liver needs 91 per pound (your brain weighs around 3.8 lbs, your liver about the same). On top of this, your muscles need 6 calories per pound at rest - that’s without even getting out of bed. This means that your body needs on average 700 - 1000 calories per day JUST to keep you alive.

Food is nutrition and your body needs a certain amount of nutrition to work properly. So not enough food = not enough nutrition. That means drying hair and skin, weakened nails, osteoporosis, constipation, insomnia, coldness, poor circulation, stopped periods. We make the mistake in today’s society of thinking food is bad. It’s not. We’ve forgotten in the mania to be thin that food is actually the thing which keeps us alive.

One final point. Weight lost quickly will initially be water weight and the weight of the food in your body. That’s why people lose a lot of weight in the first week of a diet - it’s got nothing to do with losing fat. Weight lost quickly is weight gained back again quickly. Crash diets and fasts don’t work in the long run, it really is that simple.